At ExpoRail in Delson, Quebec. I've seen these inside industrial complexes in Europe for use by their 4-wheel freight wagons, but does anyone know where this one came from?

http://www.railpictures.net/viewphoto.php?id=77567

Turntables of this size were common elements of steam locomotive shop and roundhouse design as they allowed loose driving wheels to be moved to and from a truing lathe without a crane.

That's too small for four wheel freight wagons, but as Tom said, they were used here in North America for moving wheelsets in shops, also moving complete trucks. In addition, back in the days before fork lift trucks, a lot of shops used rail borne carts to move materials to work stations. When I worked in the former Chicago Surface Lines (streetcar) West Shops, our Carpenter foreman's office occupied what a 1911 drawing of the facility labelled as a lumber dry kiln. The drawing showed two small turntables like this for access to the tracks what went into the kiln, and in 1980 one could still see the circular outline of their pits in the driveway outside the building.

Turntables like this are still regularly installed in new rail transit shops to move trucks to and from other locations in the building. All the new ones I have seen have two "tracks" at right angles so the table need only be moved once, and not returned to the "through" position.

I visited Marta's Avandale shops about 1989. A professional friend had a tester I needed to see and he knew I was also interested in railroads so he invited me down.

We saw the main shop and the drop pits for the trucks. short tracks ran everywhere for trucks to be moved on. We went to the stairweall and walked up to the second floor and when I came out, here were RAILS in the floor. The freight elevator was to the left and the trucks were rolled down the rail peeping out of the tile hallway to a turntable. The hall had a zigzag in it and so there were two more turntables Farther down the hall, there was another turntable and a set of double doors to the left. They brok down and reworked the entire power truck (electronics and mechanics) in there on the secon floor - wheel lathe and all.

I would not have recalled it until this thread came up so I'm not sure I recall all the details correctly but it was impressive.

Doug

Folks,
The smallest one I have ever seen is the 2 foot gauge, 32 foot long table at Edaville RR. It was originally from the Bridgton and Saco RR in Maine, then went down to Edaville RR and is now back in Maine at the Maine Narrow Gauge Museum.

I don't believe that it has been set up there. But they should have all the parts and hardware.


Ted Miles

The Huntsville & Lake of Bays in Ontario has two of about six foot length, one at each end of the line, to turn their 0-4-0T locos. The have a web site at http://www.portageflyer.org where one can be seen at the "Flyer Experience" area.